1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a data processing device and method for discharging liquid droplets, a liquid droplet discharge device, a storage medium in which is stored a data processing program for discharging liquid droplets, and a data processing signal for discharging liquid droplets.
2. Related Art
At present, inkjet printers that print on a recording medium by discharging liquid ink droplets from plural discharge nozzles arranged in a recording head have become widespread. Among such inkjet printers, printers that use a recording head where discharge nozzles that discharge liquid droplets are two-dimensionally disposed as shown in FIG. 11A are also known. In the recording head illustrated, plural discharge lines (below, these will be called discharge groups in order to avoid confusion with lines of an image) configured by plural discharge nozzles disposed at predetermined intervals in a main scanning direction are arranged in a sub-scanning direction (paper conveyance direction) in a state where they are slightly offset from each other in the main scanning direction. The inkjet printer can print an image of a single line using these plural discharge groups, whereby the inkjet printer can print an image with high resolution.
Control of from which discharge nozzles the liquid droplets are to be discharged (i.e., on/off of each discharge nozzles) or control of the amount of liquid when liquid droplets are to be discharged is performed on the basis of image data (bitmap data). In this case, when the discharge nozzles of the recording head are two-dimensionally arranged as shown in FIG. 11A, it is necessary to extract and sort the image data to be used in accordance with the positions of the discharge nozzles from a storage section in which the image data are stored.
As shown in FIG. 11B, the image data are sequentially stored in the storage section for each pixel configuring an image. The image data corresponding to the positions of the discharge nozzles are read from here in order to discharge ink droplets. In FIG. 11B, the portions indicated by halftone dots represent image data corresponding to positions in the sub-scanning direction of the discharge groups, and the black dot portions represent image data corresponding to the discharge nozzles of each of the discharge groups. In this manner, because the storage regions storing the image data corresponding to the discharge nozzles of each of the discharge groups are not continuous (sequential), it is necessary to access each individual storage region in accordance with the discharge nozzles and read the image data.
In this manner, accessing the discontinuous storage regions causes an increase in the number of times the storage section is accessed (in the example of FIG. 11B, 64 times). Further, even if the image data of the continuous storage regions are read all at once from the storage section, virtually all of the read data are not used at the time of reading because image data corresponding to each of the discharge nozzles of the same discharge group are not stored in a continuous (sequential) address region.